The Future of Work: A VICE News Special Report

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we're riding the back of an autonomous truck it's about to take a left turn into oncoming traffic so if their sensor is damaged sanction clear not true it's accelerating on its own it's braking on its own it's steering on its own the trucking in the United States is like a seven hundred billion dollar a year industry and it employs 1.8 million people thus far it's been pretty immune to the changes of globalization and technology but that's about to change with technology like this true [Music] there's a operator here there's a safety engineer here because they're still experimenting it's still kind of in development [Music] have you put your hand on the wheel at any point this is like a pretty complex traffic situation there are cars merging their cars passing us this truck is changing lanes to go around slow traffic anticipating when people are stopping and honestly I just like kind of can't believe it it's it's driving itself and it's doing a pretty good job cheering there we go making a right turn and we drive way [Music] we recognize that this is a highly disruptive technology on the order of 10 million people and displacing rapidly that many people would have a dramatic societal impact we certainly don't want to see that we're not targeting that we're focused on relieving a shortage but what we're hoping is that there will be a natural evolution into the jobs of the future just as there has been in every other technological change what do you tell a trucker we try not to tell truckers things we try to listen [Music] this is Chuck jock runs a company that is developing and is gonna produce self-driving trucks that are autonomous to do it themselves you guys are truck drivers yes sir how do you feel about the truck doesn't have a driver in it somebody had headquarters sitting behind a monitor no there's a driver in there no in the future when there isn't you know once it's fully tested no we don't need to have a driver in my research no it's not driver assist it is purely self-driving so like a GPS basically you're going from point A to point B there's GPS in it there's a lot of tech but GPS is a part of he took me into one of his trucks today we did like a 90 minute run up and down i-10 traffic was merging in it was it was changing lanes it was breaking it was accelerating it was like so there's a dude really good when the cars cut y'all a car cut us off and you know what it didn't play them on the brakes the truck just kind of kept rolling hold your equipment handling the high winch we're actually surprisingly good real in high winds how much weight the trailer we've gone empty and loaded empty and load yes sir we have very complex control algorithms and now we hold it with such precision that it is perfectly straight it's tough you seemed pretty impressed actually yeah I am I wasn't all for it buy me this I got it I got to see this [Music] that's laser it's lidar it's a laser like a laser radar what do you love about driving truck Oh God he'll love the drive me it's a privilege it's a privilege to get out there get behind the wheel for 80,000 pounds drive that thing down the road knowing hey you know what I can do this you can't do it no I can and I know I'm providing the us I'm providing the world with whatever I got in the back of my Freight I deliver your clothes your food that you're eating a lot of people don't see that and it's a good feeling as a driver as a human being you really got to have faith to rely on is this gonna kill me or yep and we'll have to do a lot of testing to prove that all right that's definitely different over the next year we're building a fleet of 200 trucks and we're gonna be operating them day at night just to validate it to prove it we have to prove to you we have to prove to the regulators to the States we have to prove to ourselves and you asked me to what would I do if I didn't drive I can't honey something inspectors I really don't know what I would do I'd be scared [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's one of the first questions that every kid gets asked what do you want to be when you grow up previous generations grow confident that no matter the answer maybe something that's actually not so certain any automation already affects most jobs but the pace of change and the sheer capabilities of artificial intelligence are revolutionising our relationship to work something economists are paying close attention to technologies are tools they don't decide what we do we decide what we do with those to us if we have more powerful tools by definition we have more power to change the world than we ever had before it took about six hundred years for global average incomes to increase by 50% Wow here we are from 1988 to now almost 50% or more increases across the board of humanity this is because of economic freedom and because of technological progress it just expands the possibilities and therefore expands our income so much more quickly than we've ever seen before the problem is that as the economic pie is gotten bigger not everyone has shared wages at the bottom today of the same adjusted for inflation as they were 60 years ago so all that growth didn't go down to the people at the bottom the future of work has even caught the attention of experts like Richard Haass and the Council on Foreign Relations who've authored a report on the threats it poses to geopolitical stability millions of jobs are beginning to disappear you've got now a whole new generation whether it's artificial intelligence robotics autonomous or driverless vehicles that are coming along that will displace millions of workers in this country in the United States but also around the world and as suddenly these technologies come along and they destroy our existing relationships the stakes for us as individuals are enormous and unless we can replace all that what's gonna come of us now you drop a few drops of blood in the shark tank which is a which is AI has machine learning and we're gonna shut down factories we're gonna place truck drivers what if everything in the country is owned by three people who are the ones who invented the robots yeah begging them markrob what can I eat today please will ya me something you can see why people get upset even thing about blood your blood is gonna boil the discontent that is evident in the brexit vote in 2016 the vote for Trump in 2016 what is very clear there's a lot of discontent a lot of people have not been doing very well it isn't clear how long we have before the political system comes under enormous stresses we as a society have not even begun to have a sustained or comprehensive national conversation and what worries me is by the time we really get around to dealing with this it's gonna be too late over three and a half million people work in fast food it's one of the easiest jobs to get and a good first step on the ladder up to a job with better pay and less grease but it's Southern California's Cali burger gianna toboni found out even this first step is in jeopardy our vision is that we want to take the restaurant industry and more broadly the retail industry and make it operate more like the internet we want to automate as much as we can and allow merchants that operate brick-and-mortar businesses to see their customers in the same way that Amazon sees their customers that was 10 seconds probably this was our first robot to work on the grill the entire fleet of robots that we deploy learns from the training that takes place here in Pasadena so unlike humans you teach one robot and perfect it and then you can deploy that software to all the robots in the field what are the advantages of automating a business like this for a restaurant chain consistency is critical to success right critical to scale these restaurants would be safer when you automate him he was touching the food less labor costs is a big issue right now right it's not just raising minimum wage but its turnover they come in they get trained and then they leave to go driving over or do something else I noticed you still have some employees back here it's not a slippy front oh yeah so we currently think about this is a Kovac working arrangement we have the robot automating certain tasks that humans don't necessarily like to do but we still need people in the kitchen managing the robotic systems and working side-by-side the robot to do things that it's not possible to automate at this point of time not only how do you like working here it takes a little bit of getting used to but I really do like yeah cool [Music] [Applause] Chabad exes anew word but the idea has been around forever let's integrate new tools into old tasks and do them faster [Music] at Amazon's robotic enables fulfillment centers thousands of newly developed a I powered cobots are rebuilding how man and machine work together we actually started introduced in robotics and around 2012 so just like seven years ago yep since then we have created almost 300,000 jobs just in fulfillment urns like that and fulfillment centers across the Amazon workforce we have this first example cubed machine collaboration uh-huh these are mobile shelves that are drive units of the little orange robots you see below you can move those at will any shelf at any time and at the right time like magic at Universal Station it's going to say hey I think that object is right here Wow now she is going to do a pick operation that scan and if it's asses that bar it's the right object and God he's just but it's interesting so who's sort of who's working for who here it's like the robots are coming to her she's taking this stuff out and putting it in but then she has to say to the robot oh yeah it's actually it is it on her time or is it on the robots I love it it's it is a symphony of humans and machines working together right now you put them both together in order to create a better system is there a day where there's gonna be a robot who can pick and look through things just as good as she can and is that a day that you're planning for are you already planning for it humans are amazing at problem-solving humans are amazing at generalization humans have high value i judgment right why would we ever want to separate that away from our machines we actually want to make that more cohesive what's cool is in Amazon it's growing big time yeah yeah and it's creating a lot of jobs it's one of the biggest job creators yeah world so with automation working hand in hand with people is it making jobs better I think it is making it better first of all our associates they choose to come and work on our foot and we're really proud of the wage benefit that we are offering our associates is $15 minimum that we instituted this year really proud of that they are the reason that were so successful inside our fulfillment centers this is job he's 23 and at the very beginning of his career he dropped out of college for financial reasons then left a job at an elementary school to become an Amazon associate because it paid better he still works there which is why he asked us not to use his last name when I heard he was working with robots I thought the idea was cool huh there's something I only imagined coming out of a sci-fi movie but um I guess for the most part I dislike the strolling process going so what's that exactly just imagine just teenagers all day for those 10 hours yeah you know you feel like you have to move fast and have to do right by the robots you know do the robots work for you or do you work for the robot Wow that's a good question I feel like I work for the robots at Amazon data seems like to be this like huge thing like do they track your data as a human they charge everyone like how many products are you actually moving in a single day I think the highest I've ever stole was 2300 units Wow yeah you feel like the robots you're working with Oh something you want to keep doing for a while you want to stick around with it what Amazon yeah no that was quick right what agency do you have when you step into that building what am i betting you for lunch but it's funny because it's like I'm hearing from people and Amazon that human creativity and problem-solving is still something that they value you heard that from someone I do I don't know I haven't been put in a position where as I can like you know be creative and pretty so a lot of people haven't I know that one day I would like to get a career that I don't feel like I need a vacation from it's the whole thing I'm being useful you know like that's part of being a human you'll have to feel useful for something you know if you're replaceable yeah of course I know that if I get fired there'll be another person in my place ASAP so do you think they're gonna try to automate you out of your job because they wouldn't have to worry about people being injured on the job so they can replace us with robots I think it could be done from 2015 to 2017 Amazon held competitions where college teams design robots to do more or less what job does all-day single out objects grab them then still them in a specific place so you know how I can collapse a hand so I can get it into where it is a robotic hand just I haven't seen anything with that sort of dexterity that's ty Brady the same Amazon exactly met earlier sure he hasn't seen a robot perform that task yet but that's exactly why it's the holy grail for making robots as physically versatile as humans [Music] can I will it hurt my hand no hi yeah it's not bad yes I'm sure kind of gentle so we've spent on however many hundreds of PhDs and decades trying to make robots smarter at grasping we're starting to get there with artificial intelligence in neural networks but even still it's still very early in terms of our ability to grasp right right and the Amazon picking Shaw is a perfect example a bunch of Minds working on it for a long time and we still haven't figured out how to just pick things from a bit and that's a multi-billion dollar potentially trillion dollar value proposition what's so hard about it keep it smart right what we think is hard is very different from what computers think is hard so we think that being a chess grandmaster is a hard challenge but the computer can just go through all the possibilities where as this like there's infinite possibilities to grab that Apple what happens when we crack the grasping problem blocks your Amazon voice this March MIT and Harvard debuted a new concept of the grabber saying Amazon's just the kind of company that could use it Amazon already sucks up nearly 50 percent of America's ecommerce transactions and makes a dollar for every 20 spent by American shoppers there's a reason it's valued at nearly a trillion dollars but Amazon and its tech peers like Apple Google and Facebook employ far fewer people than the richest companies of previous eras so even if robots aren't helping you find the right size at a brick-and-mortar gap quite yet that doesn't mean they aren't eroding the future of retail work I spent most of my childhood in Southern California the wit wood mall and La Puente Mall were they the center of social life Austan Goolsbee is a professor of economics and was the chair of Economic Advisers under President Obama retail was kind of often an entry-level job he's probably 16 million 50 million people in the United States work and retail yeah and this technology if you want to think of it as that yeah that's interesting replaced a different kind of retail mm-hmm so could you see like a mall like this a an example of kind of creative destruction yeah maybe I mean you can see the destruction how could you make a living doing that you know the the Hat world hat there's to this hat world there's a sensation you know they're competing against each other yeah and now it's a almost seems quaint mm-hmm from the 80s and the 90s and into the 2000s if you had say a college degree the technology has been great and it's allowed you to increase your incomes a lot yeah if you're the financial guy the number of deals you can do is expand it exponentially as your as the computing power is gone up those same technologies have come at the expense of expensive physical labor mm-hmm that's the first thing they try to replace [Music] one virtue of technology is that it's impersonal it's an equal-opportunity disrupter so even as automation and AI hit lower wage jobs they're coming for higher wage jobs too and the people at this MIT conference are pretty excited about it the biggest I think focus for a while it's gonna be AI acceleration basically can we use machine learning and AI in fields that have not had a so far what do we have to do let's fund them let's hire the people and so forth to bring that those tools and techniques to science most of us walk around with this implicit rule of thumb in our heads about how we should divide up all the work that needs to get done between human beings and machines it says look the machines are better than us at arithmetic they're better at transaction processing they're better at record-keeping the better at all this low-level detail stuff than we are awesome give all that work to the machines let the human beings do the judgment jobs the communication jobs to pattern-matching jobs when I think about the progress that we're seeing with AI and machine learning right now that progress is calling into question that rule of thumb in a really profound way right because what we're seeing over and over is that the computers are better at pattern matching than we are even the expert human beings and actually they've got better judgment judgment calls are basically all we do at the office every day we take the facts at hand run them through past experiences give them a gut check and then execute and these days we're offloading judgement calls to computers all the time whether it's to take the subway take the streets or take the highway or what's a binge watch next and what's behind these decision-making tools is a technology called machine learning some machine learning relies on programmers pre setting the rules of the game like chess this world champion garry kasparov walked away from the match never looking back at the computer that just beat up others utilize what's called neural networks to figure out the rules for themselves like a baby this is called deep learning however it's done programmers use other recent innovations like natural language processing image recognition and speech recognition to take the messy world as we know it and shove it into the machine and the machine can process more data more dimensions of data more outcomes from the past more everything and could even go from helping making judgments in real-time to making predictions about the future with vast amounts of data available in the legal medical and financial world and the tools to shove them all into the computer the machines are coming [Music] gianna visited a tech company called la geeks to see whether their new machine learning software could put lawyers on the chopping block we built an AI engine that was trained after reviewed many many many different contracts how many tens of thousands even more we decided to focus on automating the review and approval of contracts so simplifying and making that process faster that actual analysis it happens on the backend takes a couple of seconds the work is actually going through the report that the system generates and then fixing whatever issue that is found so this the system has flagged all of these items for you exactly okay some of them are marked where they don't match my policy and some of them are marked green meaning that they do match my policy it gives me all of the guidelines about what the problem means and also what I need to do in order to fix it but then I fix the problem so it didn't spellcheck start doing this like in the 90s how is this different yeah the way logics work is very very different it actually looks at the text understand the meaning behind the text Wow very similar while a human lawyer would review it right the only difference is that with the AI system it never forgets it doesn't get tired and I don't need to drink coffee hey Keanu don't you nice to meet you you ready for this yeah so let's do this all right I feel like John Henry so tun G you're going up against this AI system with nori to spot legal issues in two NBA's we're rating you guys on both speed and accuracy and because this isn't a commercial for law geeks no need you to try your hardest to beat this computer on it all righty on your marks get set go so we set a little phrase into this contract it says in case of any breach by the recipient of any obligations under this agreement the recipient will pay advise news the penalty of fifteen thousand dollars per event so we're gonna see if Dungey and AI system commanded for 10 G's just still working away over here so far it's taken him more than double the time that it took the computer I mean while Nuria and I just got a coffee he's having a meeting right now pretty clear just how much time this technology says done okay guys the results are in okay law geeks ninety five percent on the first NDA 10g 85% second NDA ninety-five percent for the computer 83% for 10g you don't seem disappointed I wasn't disappointed when the iPhone came out and I could do more things with this new piece of technology stuff this is exciting to me so nori did the computer catch the phrase we put in there about by snooze uh yeah the computer caught it and I was able to strike it out Sanji did you catch it i straight-up missed it I didn't see it at all we take cash check giving so McKenzie says that 22% of the lawyers jobs 35% of paralegals job can now today be automated so then what happens these jobs don't go away people just take longer lunch breaks or take on more clients or what we're kidding ourselves you me think that things are not going to change but similar to pilots with the autopilot you know it's not like we don't need Palatine could this technology pass a bar okay so we still need lawyers to to be signing off on these legal documents even if they're not doing the nitty-gritty of them absolutely defining the policy serving as escalation points and the negotiation and then also handling more complex contract categories you have you know a new generation of lawyers that are much more tech savvy the ones that can actually leverage technology are the ones that managed to prosper unlike the law medicine has always been intertwined with technology but its relationship the robotics isn't just graceful it's miraculous what is the most groundbreaking thing about how far we've come with robotic surgery so robot Assoc allow us to really treat tissue in a more delicate way allow us to be much more efficient in suturing decreasing bleeding we are improving outcomes shortening hospital stay and that way we're using more and more now so the robot is enabling surgeons and by enabling surgeons is giving access to more patients to minimally invasive surgery okay we're good to go that's great right there's one of the huge problems in our healthcare system right is that not enough patients are getting seen when they need to be seen nobody that not every patient get the same care you may have great surgeons in one area but not another area with the same experience the robot is this flattening I say that the biggest groundbreaking party the fact that I am operating on a console and the city we saw the patient we have all the degrees of articulation you would have in your hand inside the abdomen that's revolutionary that's close okay I'm gonna go out and come Express on the way robotic surgery is evolving do you see any jobs like the job of a technician or a physician's assistant going away no about what we have seen it the opposite is them being much more involved okay stapler loading up the seam guard unis Anderson knows how to move it around you need a scrub take the nose cut too low the instruments how to clean the camera how to move the arm have to undock I like it a lot there what do you think yeah it looks good only good perfect Hey unbelievable look at that how do you think automation will evolve in this area they're not only changes from patient to patient but with machine learning the system we were to recognize different issues and I'm sure that in the next year we only see the system telling you does cancer that no cancer Wow and that what the benefits are gonna be Finance has been cashing in on the benefits of machine learning for years hiring so many programmers that it's virtually indistinguishable from tech Michael Moynihan visited goldman sachs to see how they're leveraging ai's predictive capabilities to make more money how has your job changed and how is this industry changed over time you know there's been a lot of automation I think it lends itself naturally to trading right if I'm trading Google if I have to make a decision where they're going to buy it or sell it at a certain price there are hundreds of variables that go into that decision and you can code an algorithm to assess all those variables and when you swing that bat a thousand times it's going to do it more efficiently than a human would so when you look on the floor the New York Stock Exchange they're on a lot of traders down there anymore if I went down there today what would I see you wouldn't see a lot of people you might see them clustered little tiny clusters of people will be a cluster so to be in this industry now do you need to understand lines of code and what they do and how to produce it I'd say more and more yes if we look at the sperm like the number of engineers technologists that we have here we're probably the largest division within the firm so you have a math background yeah math and computer science say every years is economics in computer science yes but you learned this on the fly yeah in school over here more likely most of the things we're picked up here can I say like you know an algorithm give me some sense of you know code I'll show you a really simple example so in this case I'm gonna run a volatility function essentially an algorithm and this is showing me now on a 22 day rolling basis what's the volatility level of the sp500 essentially we would write code to do that so in this library this is the volatility function it's actually fairly simple but we reduce I'm sorry that's fairly simple this is a lot of documentation this is actually a fairly simple algorithm is essentially the code that's generating what you're seeing it's terribly complicated to me people like you guys still need to exist to create these things right I mean are they self-sustaining or you can you write yourself out of a job think we're I think that'd be hot yeah formerly a tech CEO Marty Chavez is now global co-head of Goldman's Securities Division it strikes me obviously that this is an industry that has been on the forefront of using AI computers to you know make big decisions and make a lot of money what is that done to the kind of you know the job market within even within this company its crew creating new jobs that couldn't have existed before whole new businesses now exist for us and out in the world that wouldn't have been possible without the technologies that have risen over the past few years whether they're machine learning cloud services open source right all of those activities go into for instance our new consumer lending and deposit-taking activity [Music] you know the counter-argument attention these are jobs that are being created for smart people educated people rich people other people out there who are being made redundant by robots don't have the skills it's only for a rarefied few mmm how do you respond to them technological change is disruptive and there's a lot of pain and it's something that we must concern ourselves with what do you do during the disruption which has been continuous since the agricultural and industrial revolutions and I expect it will continue and will accelerate in all likelihood and so sitting back and complaining about it sitting back and doing nothing about it don't seem to be options at the same time I don't think the answer is to stop the progression of technology haven't seen that work [Music] it's worth noting at this point that even if AI tools are better at making decisions high-level judgment jobs aren't about to be automated away anytime soon and let's be clear the people who are most excited about a eyes created potential aren't the ones getting replaced so the question becomes as this disruption accelerates how do you benefit from it if you're not already rich or white or male or have a spot at the top let's put it this way it's a lot easier for all of us to get directions but it's becoming increasingly hard for most people to find their way to a stable career and they're not a lot of people whining about it there are a lot of people who are racing to catch up we visited a class at Press Cola's a nonprofit that skills up people in New York and other cities around the country for free I have had just about every terrible job you can imagine fast food grocery store stock clerk I was a supervisor at a retail store while I was in college I was a mechanic I worked in the industry for over ten years then I went through teaching then I went into solar doing sales and then I was a writer and then I became an English teacher reservation sales agent customer service marketing now I am here the job market is really shifting towards gig economy like what do you have that you can work for yourself or work for someone else a year ago I would have told you that I was gonna go to grad school and get a PhD and all that good stuff but the reality is when I graduated and I was looking for jobs one of the main things that kept popping up a software engineer coding tech do you think you would have made the move if this place wasn't free no because just graduated college so you know Sallie Mae is still knocking on my door then I've no Madore right now I'm a mom of three so my last job I was working on a busy call center and I was in a place where I felt you know undervalued robots is gonna come and take my job and I would have been without a job and what would I've been able to pass on to my children hi how are you doing but this I can give them a skill they can be in a better place in the next 10 20 years opposed to how long it took for me to figure this out do you think you're at a disadvantage as far as like that the job market itself you look at the tech industry and it's like most like other than South Asians these stations it's like people are not a lot of people of color yeah I wanted to touch on that this is actually why I decided to specifically go into coding because this is one where at the end of the day is just how good your applications are your codes are growing up I used to think this was just magic or like it's done by all the smart kids in California you know so I want to prove that it can be done by some kid in Queens who just want to do it a perfect world is that we have enough investment that we could grow to meet both the size of the demand and the size of the supply we have more employer partners willing to hire than we have graduates for we have more students where applicants applying to Purse coalesce and we have spots for right the constraint to our growth is resources the domestic investment in workforce retraining is so small and the impact automation is going to have is not going to be equitable mm-hmm that it's largely people of color largely women who are in the current low-wage occupations that are going to be displaced there really should be some some critical thinking and some action that legislators are taking to invest in programs like this for decades the federal government has repeatedly taken action to fund rescaling I'm proud today to sign into law the job training Partnership Act a program that looks to the future instead of the past giving all Americans the tools they need to learn for a lifetime is critical to our ability to continue to grow the bill I'm about to sign will give communities more certainty to invest in job training programs for the long run but in today's dollars that funding has fallen for years president Trump campaigned on bringing jobs back to American workers a Trump administration will stop the jobs from leaving America and he signed an executive order enacting what he calls the White House's pledge to America's workers installing his advisor and daughter Ivanka Trump to lead the charge is one of my favorite words re-skilling Reese killing we're calling upon government in the private sector to equip our students and workers with the skills they need to thrive in the modern economy [Music] [Music] the Trump administration's strategy on rescaling America's workforce is a lot like its strategy for other big problems America is facing rather than increasing public investment they prefer to see private industry fill the void for the past nine months the Trump administration has been twisting the arms of CEOs to promised funding for worker education and training and so far more than 200 companies have signed on the Toyota being the latest new development workforce training I think James was a little bit inspired he's just increased that commitment does government have a role absolutely but is it to define what the workforce looks like no if the state were to develop a program for Toyota's workers of the future it would be a failure straight up Toyota knows what Toyota needs but the risk perhaps is reliance on a company that isn't you know owned by you and me like the government is it's owned by shareholders is there a problem with having a private response to a public problem who has more of a vested interest in getting this right the government or the private company well private company does it is in the best interest of a Toyota or any other company to train the best quality people pay them as much as possible give them the standard of living and the quality of life that makes them want to come in retire 20 30 40 years later from the very same company it's in the company's interest until it isn't and the thing about a company is like we don't elect their executives but we elect our government official yeah but the idea that we're gonna rely on government in elected people to come up with rules for training people for jobs that you will volitionally want to buy the products up is crazy under the pledge they're promising 200,000 new opportunities they're promising to re-skill and retrain 200,000 people so you have the capacity to do that what happens if they break the promise again they're gonna do their right can you man date the government does it if they don't do it it's not like we're gonna not reelect a CEO they don't do it they might have some bad publicity they might trip might not affect their CEO here's what happens if they don't do it if they're not making these investments there's not a chance that they survive [Music] [Applause] this is landed in Tim two buddies who work together at the Toyota factory Tim's just retired but Landon sees himself working at Toyota for decades it must be kind of nice to at least know that like at a high level they're thinking about your jobs the things that you guys do the opportunities that you guys have is it strike you that way with the bunk I just looked and said okay it's PR do people want to be Reese killed if their job depended on it and they know what's coming I would say sure yes it would be depending on your personal circumstances that could be very hard because if you work you know a full shift and you have a family you may only have an hour to a free time a day are you supposed to go drive to a training facility and spend a few hours a day there before you go to your chef you go work your shift mm-hmm I don't think very many people would do that do you guys like the job or do you like working there you go dealing I actually love my job yeah I'm you know because I've always loved working on cars so my job was pretty much up my alley there are parts of my job that I like it's a you know you're creating something there's no way I could exist without someone putting it together so yeah the wife and two daughters right I want to spend as much time with him as I can mm-hmm they're young and they're not gonna stay young for long and I hate missing the time I miss when I'm at work already I just want to spend as much time as I can with them and I want to retire that's that's to go for people in the workforce today rescaling boils down to doing more work just to keep up to andrew yang a former job creation specialist and now longshot presidential candidate the spotlight on Reese killing hides a larger imbalance between the goals of workers and the goals of their employers we are so brainwashed by the market that otherwise intelligent well-meaning people will legitimately say we should retrain the coal miners to be coders yeah we are trained to think that we have no value unless the market says that there's a need for what we do and so if coal miners now have zero value then the thought process oh we have to turn them into something that does have value what has value coders and then 12 years from now AI is gonna be able to do basic coding anyway so this is a race we will not win it's the goal posts are gonna move the whole time on us what are the solutions like what are you proposing we start issuing a dividend to all American adults during at age 18 where everyone gets $1,000 a month so basically a universal basic income yes we rebranded the freedom dividend okay because it tests much better with conservatives with the word freedom in it and it's not a basic income at the dividend which is to say like the economy is at a surplus so everyone deserves a piece of the pie ya know all of us are owners and shareholders of the richest society in the history of the world that can easily afford a dividend of $1,000 per adult people need meaning structure purpose fulfillment and that is the generational challenge that faces us it's not like the freedom dividend giving everyone a thousand dollars a month solves that challenge it does not but what it does is this time it buys this time and also channels resources into the pursuit of meeting that challenge you know it ends up supercharging our ability to address what we should be doing Universal basic income once a marginal political fantasy has been embraced by more than a few rabid capitalists in recent years we should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas it's free money for everybody enough to pay for your basic needs food shelter education I don't think we're gonna have a choice it will come about one day and I think out of necessity out of necessity and and I think that you know since he should experiment Michael Moynihan went to one city that already is there Stockton's mayor won election at just 26 years old taking office five years after the city declared bankruptcy so you grew up here boy your race borne arises home and you left for a brief period to go to Stanford that for four years I came right back with funding from Silicon Valley he's launched a pilot program that's giving 125 residents $500 a month for 18 months why does Silicon Valley guys like this so much kiss before all of them I think a lot of them see how detrimental beat society if there's mass number of people who are automated without any way to make a means for themselves without any way to provide for themselves music people in tech kind of paying indulgences and saying hey we're kind of screwing this up we want to we feel bad about it here's some money I know some people are talking about robot taxes it means you're not sorry that it may very much agree with that that they have a responsibility to the society it's voluntary now but it might be at the point of a gun later yeah you have voluntary to start and pilot but absolutely I think it to scale it it's not gonna be about generosity it's gonna be a matter of policy the criticism that most people get for ubi type experiments is that all right just giving people money and a handout etc that's a start but what's the long-term goal for jobs in Stockton the hypothesis will recognize that folks have their basic needs met and then create the workforce of the future primarily starting with the kids in our schools now but also with adults and give them opportunities for retraining rescaling but also supporting people in the arch for new oil pursuits close with a lot of potential but historically folks who haven't been seen as important enough for investment are pouring there for governments to really partner with so it's what makes me really excited about the work we're doing in Stockton so this is the downtown marina watch your step there's basically nothing here when you were a kid when you were like I never really came out here till I came back for City Council yeah this wasn't part of my Stockton but I think for me the spot so important because it represents real potential there's I had many cities I have this yeah when we talk about the future of work we're talking about how do you ensure that those left behind today aren't further left behind tomorrow and that's my biggest fear folks were making at least now are most likely to be automated out of jobs of making anything so for me a basic income is it even about the future work it's about getting a foundation set in the present so that when the future work happens we have a firm foundation on which we could pivot and figure out what we can do with and for people what's attractive about ubi is its simplicity but that's also what makes it vulnerable to critique I don't think these utopian ideas of universal basic income every I robots do all the production and then everybody stays at home with a decent income and plays video games I think that's a very dystopic future and it won't work and I think it will lead to a huge amount of discontent we really have no option but create jobs for the future politicians have to start engaging these issues to figure out what's politically feasible it's gonna trigger fundamental debates about things like a universal basic income that everybody ought to get money and the question is okay where's that money gonna come from according to a progressive think tanks analysis a ubi program giving every American ten thousand dollars a year would cost the government more than three trillion dollars annually the entire 2018 federal budget was just over four trillion dollars universal basic income isn't the only policy being floated to shore up the workforces shaky financial foundation whether it's using federal funds to guarantee jobs for anyone who wants one giving tax breaks to companies to create more jobs or strong-arming companies to keep their factories open but all these policies and strategies tell us is that the broad consensus is that right now things aren't working [Music] we've designed a system where as the technology creates more wealth some people bizarrely are made worse off we have to update and reinvent our system so that this explosion of wealth and productivity benefits not just a few but the many this challenge of new technologies are not taking place in a vacuum this country's already divided it's divided geographically it's divided culturally politically we've got to be prepared for the fact that it could actually take the social differences we already have and make it worse there's got to be a sense of urgency here a higher level of disconnection alienation more declines in social capital more groups of people left behind more geographic areas left behind [Music] this is not a recipe for a stable prosperous happy society my worry is not that the robots will take all the jobs my worry is that more people will be left behind and will feel left behind by what's going on if we continue in the way we've run our economy for the last 40 years it will be disastrous and so when we talk about the future of work we're kind of talking about the future of the whole system that's right I'm you cannot have a prosperous economy without prosperous workers Voltaire said that work saves us from three great evils boredom vice and need so much of our identities are tied up with our jobs people ask you how you're doing who you are what you do and that's essential to to our sense of self if we have millions or tens of millions of chronically long-term unemployed what's going to become of those people it's not something a question of how are they going to support themselves what are they going to do [Music] this your habit not sensor drift unlocks conversion efficiency one box you know someone might say robots are coming might as well hang up the keys now it's that go through your head it's gonna happen it's gonna happen what's gonna happen with these vehicles driving by themselves huh change is good some change ain't good you know I mean that's gonna be a lot of people out of work and what do think I'm gonna do it's gonna be a crash I mean I think there'd be a lot of outrage riots more and less you know what I mean sure cuz they're gonna fight to try to keep the job I mean what I do it yeah I would do it it's gonna be a chain reaction in reality you got to look at the economy and what is it gonna do the economy was it gonna do to the American people to the end not just the industry I meant to the world what's gonna happen you got the whole world pissed off but me I want to die in the truck actually I'm gonna die in the truck brother I've told I've told all my friends I've told my family that's when that retires when I die in that doing that die in a truck yeah I mean I don't been doing it for too long it's in the blood [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 577,007

Rating: 4.8519483 out of 5

Keywords: VICE News, future of work vice, andrew yang, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, vice news 2019, future of work 2020, krishna andavalou vice, gianna toboni vice, technology, industria revoltuion, artificial intelligence, robot lawyers, automation, robot jobs, vice special report, VICE on HBO special, current events, shane smith, universal basic income, vice special report the future of work, vice on hbo full episodes, AI machine learning

Id: _iaKHeCKcq4

Length: 54min 47sec (3287 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 20 2019

Reddit Comments

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[u/bigitybang]

Disclaimer: I meant for it to be humorous calling Andrew Yang our saviour, but this video freakishly exposes the belly of the automation beast. I now get why Andrew Yang felt compelled to run for president.

[u/pdutch]

Yang interview starts here.

Also, I prefer to think that by "long shot" candidate, the vo was referring to Yang's espresso preference.

[u/aesthenix]

wow. just watched the first 5 mins and i'm superglued to see where they go with this....

EDIT: alright, just finished it. this vid starts by showing AI and it's effects implemented into reality, presents the question of how that transition will look going into the future, and poses UBI in a very good light toward laying the foundation for that future. the 1 hr watch is well worth it.

also, it is jaw dropping to see just how much of Amazon is automated. and also unreal, the chart showing that Amazon has generated way more than half the ecommerce sales this year compared to all other major sites COMBINED.

https://i.imgur.com/3HXC8N1.png

[u/Levibisonn]

This is how I found out about Andrew yang back in April when this aired! One of the best paced and informative documentaries to come out in a long time!

[u/aA_White_Male]

Dont call him our savior they already call us a cult.

[u/Telemaq]

I saw bit of this documentary months ago but never realize there was a much longer version available. Eye opening.

[u/Johnny_15]

Yes! They posted the full episode! Thanks for sharing.

[u/shredder147]

This is great for yang by the way! Excellent balanced coverage with except to the UBI cost calculation that is off.